President Biden is taking his “‘democracies’ against China” show to the London Group of Seven (G7) Summit. His agenda, set out in his op-ed piece in the Washington Post, was to convince fellow Western leaders that the U.S. can “both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age.” Biden wants to lead “democracies” against China on practically every major issue, from COVID-19 to climate change, to offer “a high-standard alternative to China for upgrading physical, digital and health infrastructure,” unite against “autocrats” on AI and ensure that “democracies,” “not China or anyone else, write the 21st-century rules around trade and technology.”
Can the “democracies” of which President Biden speaks bear the weight he is putting on them? Certainly, his own is in a parlous state, and so is its governance.
What U.S. democracy professes to be and what it is are two different, if not opposite, things. The official story is that with universal franchise and competing political parties, people get the government and governance they want.
However, like its Western counterparts, the U.S. political system is a liberal democracy, an originally liberal representative system to which a certain democratic element is a late and limited add-on. Originally, capitalist societies had liberal representative governments for which only propertied men could vote. Only struggling working men and women in trade unions, political movements and political parties, turned it into a liberal democracy in the limited sense that the franchise was extended to widening circles and eventually encompassing the adult population.
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